One of the most chilling realities of the contemporary age in the United States and other Western nations is the demise of the Fourth Estate. The death of a vigorous and free press came when mainstream media and other vital components of the information establishment became propaganda organs for the government.

"If it were left to me to decide whether we should have a government without a free press or a free press without a government, I would prefer the latter," said Thomas Jefferson.

Edmund Burke, an 18th century British political philosopher, seeded the concept of the Fourth Estate. The "three estates" present in the Parliament were the king, the lords, and the commons. But, said Burke, there was a "fourth estate" that trumped them all  the press.

The contemporary co-opting of journalists and journalism by politicians and their regimes has led to a polarization of media. As mainstream print and broadcast journalists have veered increasingly to the left, the right has responded with its own conservative media establishment.

This was a necessary development, vital for countering leftist propaganda. But the demise of the Fourth Estate means there's not much left in the middle to probe for the truth buried somewhere beneath the shrills and shills of left and right. Who can the people trust to give them the plain, unspun facts?

Journalistic agenda-ism has suffocated the Fourth Estate. And that brings danger to what is slowly becoming less and less a free republic.

One of the most chilling realities of the contemporary age in the United States and other Western nations is the demisesuicide of the Fourth Estate.

It can't happen soon enough. The real question is credentialing freelance investigation for access to government documents and to interview officials. With Zero getting away with the kind of secrecy under which he has been operating, I don't see that happening soon.

The overwhelming lack of journalistic curiosity about the candidacy of Obama is compelling evidence against the use of tax dollars for College and University Student Loans, and financial aid to education at the above high school level.

Society pays to high a price when our journalists cannot be relied upon to independently seek out basic information about our political candidates.

Obviously, if The Government pays for a journalist’s college degree, that journalist will never be objective or critical of The Government.

Journalists have thus become The Government’s guns for hire.

‘Here’s your Student Loan, kid. Now spend the rest of your sorry life saying only nice things about The Government.’

Almost all the serious shifting of public discourse and opinion of the last 50 years and particularly since Watergate and the election of Reagan in 1980 can be directly traced to the coming-out-of-the-liberal-closet of the progressive college educated liberal media.

And I don’t see what an be effectively done to combat it. I used to believe that free information on the internet (like on FR) would render such propaganda ineffective. If anything it is the opposite. Now, any so-called ‘news website’, no matter how obviously progressively slanted they are (such as Media Matters), can ‘publish’ any fake opinion they choose and their willing accomplishes on MSNBC/NBC et. al will run it as a news story and the mostly uninformed public sheeple simply don’t know they are being manipulated - being lied to, in fact.

13
posted on 12/03/2012 8:23:48 PM PST
by citizen
(We get the government we choose. America either voted for Obama or handed it to him by not voting.)

It began when the media realized they COULD bring down a government, as they did with Nixon during Watergate, which came nowhere near the minimum requirements for impeachment.

Then, they began to realize that they had the power to influence public opinion, until finally, in 2008, they were able to install their own federal government, in Obama. The problem is that they see themselves as a part of the government, and as such will do anything to protect it, even if it means hiding not just incompetence and malfeasance, but HUGE and SERIOUS crimes from the public.

Mark

19
posted on 12/04/2012 12:05:10 AM PST
by MarkL
(Do I really look like a guy with a plan?)

It began when the media realized they COULD bring down a government, as they did with Nixon during Watergate, which came nowhere near the minimum requirements for impeachment.

Disagree respectfully. This has not been an organic evolution within Western journalism, but an induced, organized rot introduced into Western high society, elite academia, and opinion-leadership journalism and infotainment professions by the Soviet intelligence services and the Communist International (COMINTERN) going all the way back to Feliks Dzherzhinsky and his Cheka. It will have been a Chekist who started the infamous Cambridge recruitment effort which eventually yielded the Philby Ring and put one of that ring next to the Queen herself (Anthony Blount).

In America, one of the first universities attacked was Columbia University, and another was Indiana University (home of Alfred Kinsey and his perverted phreak show). By the 1930's both campuses were known as Little Red Schoolhouses. Dzherzhinsky and his successsors also attacked Hollywood (Dalton Trumbo, Will Geer, and dozens of others) and tried to turn it into a closed shop of Red propagandists -- they were frustrated by Ronald Reagan, and the Red unionists were beaten by George Meany of the AFL-CIO and Walter Reuther of the UAW.s Unfortunately, no champion arose in education, journalism, or academia to confront them, and their career of destruction and disinformation (they invented that word -- dezinformatsiya in Russian) has been virtually unchecked.

Others will disagree, but I think the press and "media" have been in Soviet hands for a long, long time -- at least since the late 60's, when Vance Packard wrote about the emerging monochromatic commentariat in media.

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